Galápagos – Santa Cruz Island

In America, Adventure, Cycling tour, Ecuador 2001, Diving & Snorkeling On  11/05/2001  No comments

A week in Santa Cruz Island was enough to everybody knows me there. Beyond the fact that Puerto Ayora city is so small, there was also not many tourists around, it was low season and the airport was closed. The island has good attraction; one that I liked was bird watching sitting by the dock, especially watching pelicans and herons feeding themselves. Another activity was to see the enormous turtles in Charles Darwin Station.

The Tortuga Bay, about 3 km walking distance from the city center, is one of the most beautiful places in the region. It is a white sand beach, waves in the sea and some natural pools. I also rented a bike to visit the countryside of the island, to see small towns like Bela Vista.

I was there because i wanted to go diving. I stayed inland and got a boat every day to the dive site. As there was not so many tourists on the island,  there was not many options of diving tours. I end up doing 6 great dives. The first two dives were in a place called Gordon Rocks. It was a rainy day and there was strong currents in the water. The visibility was about 15 meters. The currents were so strong that sometimes was hard to move forward. I saw that my dive buddies were holding on the rocks to be able to move. So I did the same, but that it was a little hard because I had the underwater camera and a big flash on my hands. In spite of the difficulty, we could see lots of fishes, moray eels (they were in every hole I looked into) and the famous hammer sharks. We saw a school of them. They were a little far away. I wanted to get closer but I couldn’t go deeper, I was 37m deep and they must have been about 45m deep. After that some hammer sharks passed by us, easy to see them. By the end of the dive we saw a few white tip sharks.

The other 4 dives were in a place called North Seymor. There was also strong currents but not as bad as Gordon Rocks. The visibility was worse, something between 5 to 10 meters. The raining days… There we saw big schools of fish, we could go inside their circles and they wouldn’t go away. I loved it. This time I could get closer to the white tip sharks. They were bigger then the sharks I’ve seen before in Fernando de Noronha (Brazil). Some would go away when we got closer, others didn’t care. They looked domesticated… Although the bad weather, it was a great idea have stayed in Santa Cruz Island for diving.